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I used to love shooting photos on Pixels, but recently I’ve been feeling let down by the once high-flying series. While I have quite a few quibbles about Google’s latest entries, my biggest camera bugbear is undoubtedly the phone’s portrait mode — the results just don’t look good enough for me to ever want to frame my snaps.

Whether I’m grabbing pics of friends and family or trying to add some bokeh to a macro crop, there’s always some artifact or issue that sticks out like a sore thumb. In fairness, these complaints apply almost equally to Apple and Samsung, but as the Pixel 11 series is right around the corner , I’ve been jotting down my wish list for Google’s upcoming flagship. Number one: I really hope they can fix my lingering portrait grievances.

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“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.”

Twelve middling sentences, in a book of maybe 6,000, comes to an authorial hit rate of 99.8 percent. It’s a high bar. But Nunez has thrown the number out as an aside; she’s not speaking to the novel but rather to the semantic density of short fiction, which she’s been pondering in the lead up to her first ever story collection, It Will Come Back to You , out July 14 from Riverhead.

“I finished writing The Vulnerables ,” says Nunez of her 2023 novel, “and then, for me, an unusual thing happened. I had an idea for a story, I wrote it, and I was happy with it. This doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she says, “strangely enough, I had another one. And then another one. And one more. So I had a group of stories that were written very recently.”

Along with some encouragement from her agent, the hot hand convinced Nunez that she had something. She roped in the start of an unpublished novel and a few older pieces, but only those that stood the test of time without edits. “If something’s published already,” she says, “there’s something about going back and touching it that’s weird. Also, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

Enjoyment counts for a lot in Nunez’s craft. There’s no central theme in It Will Come Back to You , not in the traditional sense, but on a language level, Nunez’s quirky, jigsaw puzzle paragraphs are the nodes from which hidden motifs—the overall strangeness of human society, the prevalence of severe emotional isolation, the value of creativity—emerge. This artistry is perhaps most evident during character introductions, key in short fiction, when personalities must enter the page memorably enough to keep track of but quickly enough not to derail momentum.

The first thing we learn about Ace, a love interest in “Philosophers,” is that he “often began sentences with some variant of There are two kinds of people in the world.” Ace’s teacher thinks he “looked like James Dean, which just wasn’t true, even if we knew she was really talking about his aura.”

This teacher, Mrs. Mint, “was an unhappy woman with tastefully teased hair and large, distracting breasts. Her aura was that of a woman whose husband had married her for those breasts and was now tired of her.”

Later on, in “It’s All Good,” the protagonist phones a nursing home supervisor, “though I’ve never found that woman easy to talk to. About as old as my mother but sharp as a tack, she has unusually pale, watery eyes that look like a headache is gathering behind them, and such a precious standoffish manner you get the sense that if you leaned in too close an alarm would sound.”

“I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”

Not every character appears with such aplomb. But it’s remarkable how Nunez churns out these introductory descriptions, each of them a sort of Borgesian, self-contained flash fiction. “I think a lot depends on serendipity,” she says, when I ask her what makes a memorable foible. “I’m writing along and I say something about the character, and it just hits me to describe her that way in the first draft. I think it works, and I keep it. Or in subsequent drafts, it will come to me.”

(A common juncture in asking great writers about their craft. Drill down far enough, you hit the water table: explanations get muddy. “It will come to me.”)

“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with,” says Nunez of character intros. “If it doesn’t come to me in a natural way, it’s too forced. But you know, it can’t be a name, the color of the eyes, and the hair and the height. You need some detail about them. And you only need one if it’s strong.”

Nunez’s process here seems to rely less on technique than on pure “Imagination,” which happens to be the collection’s third story, kicking off in relevant fashion: “In walked Dick Franz with his look of a warlock…”

Published in The Sun in 2012, “Imagination,” intentionally or not, sheds light on Nunez’s creative engine. Its protagonist is a quixotic teenage girl named Elsie, who weaves dreamily through a party at her parents’ country home.

“An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods,” Nunez writes, “or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes start talking, telling a story, say, and get so carried away, piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, her response was to clam up.”

Nunez says she still has “a vivid memory” of what it was like to be a teenager. “I’m always surprised when I see how adults are worried about the kids,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”

As an example, Nunez cites the average teen’s obsession with looks, like when Elsie becomes infatuated with the soirée’s 30-something bartender. “Not old enough to be her father, but close,” Nunez writes. “[Elsie] tried to imagine what she herself might look like at that age. As pretty as she was now? Prettier? (Doubtful.)”

There’s a kind of “narcissism,” says Nunez, to being young. “But it’s not unhealthy. It’s about finding yourself and trying to decide what you look like. You know, everything is a potential disaster, the end of the world. It’s wonderful, wonderful!”

Perhaps fiction writers, I venture, are forced to carry more adolescence into their careers than the average person. “I think they probably do,” says Nunez. “Being able to access what you were like as a child is one of the greatest tools that you can possibly have as a writer. I mean, brain surgeons: you want them to be very adult.”

Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors.

The “wisdom” of age plays a major role in three of the collection’s closing stories but is most provoking in “The Rabbit’s Foot,” published last year by The Yale Review , in which Carmine, a downtrodden maid in a chic New York City hotel, is later criticized by her successful Ivy Leave daughter for being taken advantage of as a young woman. Nunez says the setting was inspired by Sherman Alexie’s 2017 New Yorker story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.” Apart from the setting, and some idea of a forward time shift, Nunez began writing the piece and left the rest to improvisation.

“I usually just write my way into things,” Nunez says of her plotting. She believes that “probably all” of the stories in this collection changed direction mid-writing, which in some ways is unsurprising given the nature of putting words on a page, but in other ways points to what Nunez said before, about leaving the door open for wandering bouts of inspiration.

“It just comes to me…”

“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with…”

A resistance to plotting seems as if it might lead to a certain type of story, one filled with Elsie’s famous digressions (“piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents”). Nunez avoids this trap with writerly resolve. Once she begins drafting a short story, she says, “I definitely try to finish it. I would never start another story. I start, and I want to finish as fast as possible.”

Nunez has heard of other writers who proficiently multitask, setting down a partial manuscript while starting another, interspersing it all with stories and essays. “That’s very foreign to me,” she says. “I need as narrow a focus as possible, and as few drafts.”

With this mindset, it’s unsurprising that the protagonist of the collection’s title piece mourns today’s crisis of distractibility, calling it “a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”

“It’s very worrying,” says Nunez. “I mean, technology in general is extremely worrying, for many different reasons. We are aware that there seems to be some kind of damage [to memory and focus]. But we don’t really know the specifics.”

The narrator of “It Will Come Back to You” wonders if these problems might be affecting younger generations more than older ones. But Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors. Whatever distractions afflict contemporary novelists, she says, “I don’t think it’s a prevalent problem, that the quality of the work is going down. It’s not like we only now have bad writers. Nothing could be less true.”

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QUICK FACTS

Where is it? Over the Bahamas

What's in the photo? The space shuttle Atlantis, preparing to dock with the International Space Station (ISS)

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the ISS

When was it taken? July 10, 2011

This stunning astronaut photo shows the last time one of NASA's iconic space shuttles photobombed astronauts' view of Earth as the spacecraft docked with the ISS.

NASA's Space Shuttle Program included five plane-like spacecraft — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — which collectively completed 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, racking up more than 32,000 hours in space. During that time, they helped to construct the ISS and, later, ferry astronauts to and from the station. The space shuttles also helped to deploy and maintain several other important spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope .

The last space shuttle to fly was Atlantis, which successfully completed 33 missions (the second-highest total, behind Discovery ).

This photo shows Atlantis approaching the ISS for the last time as it passed over the distinctive turquoise waters of the Bahamas . The space shuttle's bay doors are open, exposing its cargo area. This was standard procedure for all space shuttles once they reached low Earth orbit because it prevented the spacecraft's radiators from overheating.

The open doors also enabled the shuttle's docking mechanism, located within its cargo bay, to attach to the ISS, thus creating a pressurized seal so that astronauts could move between the two spacecraft.

Atlantis' final flight began on July 8, 2011, when it launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida vertically strapped to a massive fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters. It returned to Earth on July 21, gliding down to land onto a runway at the launch site. (The spacecraft is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.)

In addition to helping construct the ISS, NASA's space shuttles visited Russia's Mir space station, serviced Hubble, and deployed both the Magellan probe to Venus and the Galileo probe to Jupiter. In total, the space shuttle orbited Earth 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) — more than 525 times the distance between Earth and the moon .

Astronaut photos of the space shuttles were popular because they offered "punctuated snapshots of distinct places on Earth" that were "framed by a human eye," NASA representatives wrote in 2011 . "These images speak to people."

Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21, 2011, brining the 30-year Space Shuttle program to an end. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls) While the Space Shuttle Program achieved a lot during its 30-year history, it famously suffered two tragedies: the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters, which killed all crewmembers on board.

NASA eventually canceled the program in 2011, citing the high cost of maintaining the aging spacecraft and a reduced need for the vehicles after the completion of the ISS the same year. To this day, the space shuttles remain the only winged spacecraft to carry humans into space.

See more Earth from space

'Painting-like' ripples in the Bahamas

A 2020 satellite photo shows off the ethereal beauty of submerged sandbanks and seagrass beds in the Great Bahama Bank.

Glowing ring of algae in New Zealand

A 2026 satellite photo captured a gleaming halo of phytoplankton encircling the remote Chatham Islands and a hidden underwater plateau.

Arctic blast paints plume in Florida

A 2026 satellite photo captured a stunning scene of sediment swirling across the West Florida Shelf after an extreme cold snap.